His Brother’s Keeper
Published in Hamodia Magazine December 8, 2010
When two non-observant brothers visited the concentration camps of Poland during high school, the experience launched them each on spiritual journeys of discovery. However it took them in completely different directions – one was inspired to become frum, while the other became so disenchanted that he left Judaism and became Christian. Their incredible story is one of passion, profound family love and the deep commitment of two brothers to help each other throughout it all.
David and Jonny Linn grew up in a Conservative Jewish home in the Forest Hills section of Queens, New York. In the mid-1980s when he was in high school, David went on a six-week trip through Poland and Israel. The trip was under the auspices of the Conservative Judaism youth group United Synagogue Youth. The trip spent one week touring the death camps of Poland and five weeks in Israel.
The Holocaust had always been a significant topic in the Linn house and in David’s conscience. David and Jonny’s mother had survived the Holocaust in hiding, and had experienced many near-death experiences. Her grandparents, great aunts and great uncles had all been killed.
When David first heard about the USY trip, he jumped at the chance to attend and see first-hand the milieu of his mother’s childhood.
One day, during a tour of a concentration camp, David and the other teenagers were given time by themselves in a bunk house to contemplate and absorb their experiences thus far. David used the time to think about his own religious life in comparison to the experiences of Jews in Europe before and during the Holocaust. The stark contrast was nearly as sobering as the sights in the concentration camp.
“I started thinking about the extent people would go through to cling to a mitzvah or their Yiddishkeit,” David said. “To me, it was a little of an epiphany in my thought process that maybe there is something more there. At the very least something more important that I was missing out on in what I considered my Judaism. My Judaism was cultural, it was important, but I didn’t think it was that important.”
During the trip and upon his return to America, David also began noticing much hypocrisy in the Jewish observances in his Conservative synagogue. David observed how Jews in the death camps risked their lives to perform mitzvot, and he wondered why the Jews he knew in America lacked the same enthusiasm.
“I realized that Judaism is something that should be very serious, and if so, you don’t just play with it and decide when you’re in and when you’re out,” David said. It bothered David immensely to see Jews casually breaking Shabbas or being lax with the laws of kashrut.
David began buying or borrowing all the books he could find on Judaism and began growing in his observance. However his eagerness to learn and grow was constrained by his involvement in his synagogue and USY – he had served as President of the New York City division of USY and eventually became one of its international chairmen.
While in high school David met Sandy, who would eventually become his wife. She and her entire family had begun becoming frum a few years earlier. While they were dating, David attended Shabbas dinner in their home each week. Having a traditional Friday night experience left a big impression on him. David grew more in his Yiddishkeit and soon began attending classes at a local kiruv center, the Jewish Heritage Center. He began learning with its director Rabbi Moshe Turk. He eventually broke away from the Conservative world and embraced Orthodoxy. By the time he graduated high school he was Shomer Shabbas.
David attended college, then yeshiva in Eretz Yisrael and then returned to America to attend law school. But before starting, he and Sandy got married.
Divergent Paths
One year after David’s trip, Jonny attended the same program. The experience also launched him on a spiritual journey, but in directly the opposite direction.
As a child, Jonny yearned for a direct relationship with G-d, but he did not know how to achieve it. He could not find the answers in his Conservative synagogue.
“I considered G-d to be real. I desired to talk to G-d at crucial moments in my life and childhood, but people around me were squeamish and embarrassed to do so,” Jonny remembers. “I wanted to talk to G-d, but I was angry that I had to go to Hebrew school. It didn’t seem authentic, just a very academic venture. There were no values instilled about loving G-d, loving the Torah, doing mitzvot or learning. It wasn’t there.”
Like his older brother, Jonny had high hopes for his trip to Poland but the experience left him feeling empty. He was especially disillusioned by Conservative Judaism’s callous response to the Holocaust.
“I had always been led to believe that I had to marry a Jew because of what Hitler did. The Nazis were such a focus for the Conservative world. I was always getting the message that we have to be Jewish because of Hitler [ym”s]. I said maybe we have to be Jewish because of something else, maybe G-d and the Torah,” Jonny said.
Jonny was also disillusioned by the way the trip was run and by the response of the leaders to the sights they were seeing. The trip presented the Holocaust as a horrific event which had befallen the Jews, but without any religious or spiritual messages. Jonny was filled with questions and craved spiritual answers but the trip did not provide them. He became decreasingly committed to Judaism during the trip and abandoned the few mitzvot he was keeping.
During college Jonny eschewed all connections to Judaism. He didn’t even attend Yom Kippur services. He still felt spiritually empty and wanted answers, but had nowhere to turn. The questions and issues he had encountered in the concentration camps were still at the front of his mind, and he blindly grasped for any direction he could find.
“I was shaken up. I didn’t have answers to the Holocaust,” Jonny said. “I said it’s not a question I will find answers to in the circles I’m in now. It was scary, but I was wiling to walk away from Judaism. I was walking away from it to find the truth that resonated with me. What was my identity? It came from being in the camps, being freaked out by the camps.”
Jonny felt in his heart that Judaism was true but he couldn’t find responses to his questions in the Conservative world. So in college he began exploring other belief systems, from New Age to Eastern religions. He also formed a five-piece rock band in college called On Air, and he and the other musicians moved to Boulder, Colorado in pursuit of a music career. He did not feel good about the rock ‘n roll lifestyle and was still thirsty for truth.
It was there that he met a young non-Jewish woman named Lin, who was also on a quest for the truth. Jonny and Lin shared the ideas they were learning and embarked together on a journey of discovery. Jonny was still searching for a religion that would give him a personal relationship with G-d. He had long ago rejected Conservative Judaism, and he and Lin turned to New Age beliefs. However he flatly rejected New Age due to its denial of a single deity.
Instead he and Lin turned to Christianity. In it Jonny found many of the answers he was pursuing and found it fulfilled his need for a direct relationship with G-d. Jonny converted and he and Lin got married. He became deeply involved in Christianity, and at one point he mailed a letter to his family members telling them of his newfound religious beliefs and encouraging them to convert as well. David showed the letter to Rabbi Turk, who encouraged him to stay in touch with Jonny and to try to maintain a bond of love with him.
On Becoming An Uncle
Over the years David and Jonny were able to maintain a close connection despite their increasingly diverging religious beliefs. Jonny still looked up to his older brother David and admired his personality. Jonny recalled noticing positive changes in his brother ever since he became frum in high school.
“Something about him was settled. He was gaining a lot of strength from whatever he was doing.
I noticed that the kind of person he was really outshined most people I knew, and I really attributed that to him being religious,” Jonny said.
Jonny’s admiration for his older brother was enhanced when David became a father at age 24. In Jonny’s mind the birth of David’s first daughter solidified his spiritual growth and represented much of what he admired in his brother.
“I saw this person who didn’t have any money, putting himself through law school, married and having a child. I said this stuff is not easy. He’s sincere that he’s doing it because of the will of G-d. He really believes in what he’s doing,” Jonny said. “I saw there’s nothing stronger than that.”
Jonny put his music skills to use by becoming the choir director of his church. His band was still performing and was growing in popularity. When David had his first child, Jonny decided to put his feelings for his brother to music. He wrote a song called Davey Pray, in which he extolled his older brother to pray for him:
“Well, I don’t understand, but I want you to know / if there’s something you know that the rest of us don’t / Davey pray for me, pray for me …”
Jonny’s band had been invited to perform live during a show on a local radio station, KBOL in Boulder, Colorado. The show’s host asked the band to play the song Davey Pray and to explain its origins. In his introduction Jonny said he wrote the song to demonstrate that no matter the spiritual differences between him and his brother, their love for each other was unbreakable.
Jonny later described the song as one of the best he had ever written.
“It was not just a song I wrote for my brother, but my heart was in it. It pulled people in. The song had a magnetism to it,” Jonny said.
Responding to the Call
David was also deeply touched by the song, and clearly saw in it his brother’s pintele yid trying to get out. He realized that through the song, Jonny was subconsciously begging for a lifeline and begging him to help him out of his situation. David’s rabbi put him in contact with Rabbi Tovia Singer, an expert in anti-missionary work who has helped thousands of estranged Jews to escape from Christianity and other religions. At the time, David and Rabbi Singer were both living in New York and Jonny was in Colorado. Due to the distance Rabbi Singer ruled out a face-to-face meeting, but suggested that David send Jonny some of his tapes which show the truths about Judaism and Christianity. The tapes also reveal how missionaries intentionally misinterpret verses in Tanach to support their beliefs.
David called Jonny and asked if he would mind receiving an assortment of Rabbi Singer’s tapes, and whether he would listen to them with an open mind. At first Jonny bristled at the idea, but seeing that David’s intentions were pure and out of sincere love, he accepted.
“My brother said … ‘you’re not educated in the Jewish side of story, you never investigated the frum side of Torah. It’s not what you grew up with,’” Jonny recalled. “He called me on my integrity and said you have to investigate this if you want to take it seriously.”
Jonny accepted his brother’s challenge and began listening to the tapes. At first he listened to the tapes together with his wife, but the ideas didn’t sit well with her. So Jonny began taking long trips in his car, listening to the tapes and memorizing every word.
“The wisdom in the tapes overshadowed and obliterated every non-Jewish concept I had ever heard like a total eclipse. It blew everything away,” Jonny said. “If this is true, it is my calling to find out more.”
One day Jonny called David and sounded in distress.